“Good luck,” she said out of the side of her mouth.
“Whatever he’s paying you, I hope it’s worth it. Hope you’re socking every franc under the mattress.” Wells knew he ought to keep his mouth shut — she must make a gibbering idiot of every man who walked into this house — but he couldn’t stop himself.
She put her hand to his face and tilted his head and kissed his cheek. “Good luck,” she repeated. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
Wells walked out.
BACK IN HIS SUITE, Wells found his Kyocera satellite phone, a big black handset with a finger-sized antenna poking from the top, and punched in an eighteen-digit number and listened to silence for thirty seconds. In the 1990s, Motorola had spent billions of dollars to build a satellite network called Iridium, able to carry calls from any point in the world, including both poles.
But Iridium had been a bust. The calls cost several dollars a minute, and standard cell networks worked well enough for most business travelers. In 1999, Iridium had gone into bankruptcy. But the satellites had never been shut off. Though the network was still theoretically open to anyone, it was mainly used now by the Pentagon and CIA. The number that Wells had called was known as a sniffer. Software on the other end of the line looked for abnormalities in the connection that might indicate the phone or the connection had been tampered with. Bottom line, a silent line meant a clean phone. Or so the engineers at Langley had told Wells, and he wasn’t going to contradict them.
Of course, a clean phone was useless if the room was bugged, so Wells wandered back downstairs and into the silent streets of Zurich. It was not even ten p.m., but the city was as quiet as a castle with the moat up, the burghers and bankers home counting the day’s profits. Wells walked down the Bahnhofstrasse along the locked stores and called Shafer, filled him in.
Five minutes later: “Okay, spell the name for me.”
“B-A-S-S-I-M. K-Y-G-E-L–I. But goes by Bernard. Runs an ex-im business in Hamburg called Tukham.”
“Turkham? Like Turkey-Hamburg?”
“No, T-U-K-H-A-M. No R.”
“Any idea why?”
“Maybe he’s not a good speller, Ellis. Focus here.”
“And wants beryllium.”
“So he says. I’m meeting him tomorrow. Six p.m.”
“John.” Shafer was silent, four thousand miles away, and Wells felt him trying to figure out what to say next. Finally he sighed, as if he knew that trying to dissuade Wells from this meeting would be pointless. “All right. What’s your cover?”
Wells explained. “Can you get me papers?”
“To Germany in twenty hours? Sure. Piece of cake. Pick a last name.”
“Albert.”
“Albert? Okay. Roland Albert. Rhodesian mercenary. Better get you a British passport. We’ll hook you up with a courier in Hamburg. Can you do a Rhodesian accent?”
“Shrimp on the barbie, mate?”
“Not Australian, John. Rhodesian.” Shafer started to laugh and stopped. “This isn’t a joke. Not with five kilos of HEU missing. You know I have to tell Duto. He’ll tell the BND, get things started.”
“Give me the first meeting, at least.”
“And your fat friend? Any business left with him?”
“Deal’s a deal,” Wells said. “How’s Jenny?”
“Better every day,” Shafer said. “Sends her love.”
Wells hung up. He was directly across from the central Zurich train station now — the Hauptbahnhof, which, logically enough, marked the northern end of the Bahnhofstrasse — and he turned right and began to walk beside the narrow Limmat River, which flowed gently out of the Zurichsee. He called Exley’s cell phone, a useless exercise. She wasn’t answering him.
But tonight she did.
“Hello?” That voice. Smoky and sweet and husky and knowing. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, she whispered to him until she herself fell asleep and even then he would hear her voice comforting him. He was ashamed of every halfpenny of lust he’d had for Nadia.
“It’s me.”
“Where are you?”
“Zurich.”
“Zurich,” she said. He waited for her to ask him why, but she didn’t. “Is it safe?” she said finally. An old joke of theirs, from the scene in
“Is it safe?” Wells laughed. “It couldn’t be safer if it tried.”
She was silent for a few seconds. Normally Wells didn’t mind these pauses, but tonight he wanted her to talk, tell him she was past the worst of it, they were past the worst of it.
“How are you, Jenny? How’s your back?”
“Not skiing yet, but give me time.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Another pause.
“So. I wanted to tell you. The thing I came here for, I worked it out.”
“I don’t want to talk about that, John.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said. “I’m tired, is all. Lots of rehab today. I wish you were here.”
“I can come back.” Wells tried to keep his voice steady.
“Not till you know what you want.”
“All right,” he said. “I love you, Jenny.”
“I love you, too.” And then she was gone.
19
In addition to its side control panel, the warhead had a hinged steel plate on top to allow technicians to access its guts. A tough-looking lock, a steel box the size of a deck of cards, covered half the plate, preventing it from being raised. Nasiji poked at the box with a screwdriver. “We could try to force it,” he said. “But I don’t like the look of it. Let’s cut around it, peel off the casing.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Bashir said. “The biggest danger we face is from the plastic and these traps, not the bomb.”
Nasiji nodded to the wall of gear in the back of the stable. “Ready?”
“Let’s pray,” Yusuf said.
So Bashir grabbed three prayer rugs from the house, and for fifteen minutes the three men prostrated themselves and asked Allah for his support, finishing with Surah 2:201.
“Before we start,” Bashir said. “I thought, perhaps, we should film all this. One day the world will want to know how we did what we did.”
“We talked about this,” Nasiji said. For the first time, his voice betrayed impatience. “No cameras. No more speeches, no more prayers, no more visits to the bathroom. The nitrogen now. It’s time.”
So Bashir and Yusuf picked up an insulated container of liquid nitrogen, called a dewar, and carried it to a
